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In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were rapidly replaced with new alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. This article is about the growth of Egyptian national identity from 1908 until 1918. It highlights the importance of previously neglected colloquial Egyptian sources—especially recorded music and vaudeville—in examining modern Egyptian history. Through the lens of colloquial mass culture, the study traces the development of collective Egyptian identity during the first quarter of the 20th century. This article also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt. Finally, it introduces the concept of “media-capitalism” in an effort to expand the historical analysis of nationalism beyond print.

This essay argues that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty (1921–79), the state started to cast a long shadow over the historiography of modern Iran. Drawing on dynastic nationalism, modernization policies, and repression, the Pahlavi shahs and their bureaucratic elites produced an image of an all-powerful state completely detached from society. Scholars often reflexively replicated this top-down perspective. The resulting methodological statism, a metanarrative of state action as the inevitable ultimate reference point of all things Iranian, has reified our understanding of the modern Iranian state and, more generally, limited our vision of “the history of Pahlavi Iran.” Fixated on autocratic policymaking, we have ignored routine citizen–government interactions; equally, we lack microhistories of the complex facets of everyday life. By illuminating the politics and history of methodological statism, this essay hopes to prepare the ground for the assimilation of such alternative perspectives into the historiography of modern Iran.

This article examines an Arabist-Salafi press network in the interwar period that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Cairo and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another. Thus, this article not only expands the geographic horizons of Arab nationalism but also contributes to the scholarship examining the correlation between Islam and national identity in the interwar period.

The last century of the Ottoman Empire saw an intense move to build clock towers in Anatolia. Among the reasons for this move were the central government's desire to advertise its sovereignty in the provinces, its desire to secularize the same periphery, and that clock towers were a means for Christians to erect church towers. Compounding this already complex layering of meanings, these towers were often erected under the pretext that they would help announce the daily times of prayer. After the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, this move continued in a new guise: clock towers were attached to modern-style buildings that advertised the republican project. Using documents from the Archives of the Prime Ministry and other primary sources, this paper attempts to trace the proliferation of clock towers in Anatolia and how the meanings attached to these edifices changed through time.

This article examines the origins of the walled and fragmented Palestinian landscape by situating it within a context of recurrent encounters between dominant groups with territorial ambitions and less powerful subalterns focusing on the interplay of power and territorial space. The argument is that the Palestinian landscape is part of a long-standing narrative in which groups coveting territory transform the economy, demography, and culture of territorial space through the time-honored practice of enclosure. Enclosure is the exercise of force upon space by groups with territorial ambitions resulting in the remaking of landscapes. Mobilizing the institutional power of property law and the material power of the built environment, these groups reorder land ownership, use, and circulation on the landscape in an effort to consolidate systems of control over subalterns and reorganize socioeconomic life and demography in a place. This article argues that the project of state building launched by Zionists in Israel or Palestine is fundamentally an exercise of power on space similar to the making of enclosure landscapes from the past, notably, the enclosure landscape of early modern England. By exploring the contours of this pattern, this article seeks to uncover a more general meaning in the landscape of Palestine today.